The last episode of 2022! Paul and Rich talk about the World Cup, in a general way, but then they start to talk about how soccer functions as a platform in the world—how to see it as a kind of technology.
[Edited Transcript]
Rich Ziade: [00:00:00] Dude? Did you see it?
Paul Ford: I did. It was wonderful.
Rich Ziade: It Was madness. My wife was screaming, my son was crying. He’s a France fan. My daughter didn’t care one bit. Um, it was wild. It was, it was movie-like .
Paul Ford: Yesterday morning, Argentina led by Lionel Messi, beat France at the very, very end of the game.
Rich Ziade: Yes, it was but it was a rollercoaster of a game.
Paul Ford: Oh, it just, you thought, you thought Argentina was, absolutely had it in the bag. France looked terrible and then suddenly out of nowhere they flipped it in five minutes and then just got rocket fuel.
Rich Ziade: Rocket fuel. The momentum shifted. It was just a wild, wild game. And probably one of the greatest, and I’ve watched a lot. You don’t want, you’re more of a reader. Paul, I’ve watched a lot of sports. That might be one of the most exciting, um, like sporting events I’ve ever [00:01:00] watched.
Paul Ford: I, I’ve
Rich Ziade: I can say that pretty confidently.
Paul Ford: Well, also for it to be the last, I mean to, for it to be the World Cup Championship.
Rich Ziade: It was incredible.
Paul Ford: To be a game at that level was ridiculous.
Rich Ziade: Pretty wild. Pretty wild.
Local Teams
Paul Ford: Did you grow up a sports fan?
Rich Ziade: Yeah, dude. I used to, I used to get the post and not read the news in the post. I would flip it to the back. The font was like, make it 200.
Paul Ford: How old? How old were you?
Rich Ziade: 13, 14, 15…
Paul Ford: So the news, the news part was not for you.
Rich Ziade: It just felt far away and meaningless to me.
Paul Ford: But the sports…
Rich Ziade: Yeah, I didn’t care. I just went right to the sports.
Paul Ford: Your parents didn’t care. I know your mom, your mom doesn’t care about sports, so I, I didn’t know your dad, but like I doubt he did.
Paul Ford: So you are just kind of walking around Bay Ridge going like, “I [00:02:00] think I’m gonna get into the Yankees”. Like, what happened?
Rich Ziade: Yeah, I, well, your friends. My friends in school were like, I’m a Yankee fan.
Rich Ziade: I’m like, okay, I don’t know what that is. I’ll join that club. Or maybe I won’t. There was Met fans, you know, and it was competitive. So you, you end up, you know, it’s, I think it’s human nature. You join, you join cliques, you join clubs, and I became a Yankee fan. When they had the longest stretch of not winning anything for like 18 years.
Paul Ford: Right.
Rich Ziade: So it’s not like I was a bandwagon fan. I stuck with ’em and they sucked for like many, many years and, and, uh, it’s sports man. I like it was, it was an outlet. It was, it was something to talk about. I wasn’t athletic. My, I didn’t have par–let me just get this out of the way. My immigrant parents were not taking me to Little League.
Rich Ziade: They didn’t even take me to the park. My dad used to take me to Belmont Park, which is a racetrack, but that was about it.
Rich Ziade: So I wasn’t athletically minded. I played stickball in this – I grew up in Brooklyn – I played stickball in the street and basketball, pick up basketball, but there was no like league and like, [00:03:00] oh, there’s gonna be a rally.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: Like there’s no rally. Like I was not living the American dream in that sense. The small town American dream, but sports was a way for me to connect with new friends and, um, it was a bit of an outlet. You just joined a club. New York City sports is a special thing.
Paul Ford: except for football, but it is an absolutely wild sports.
Rich Ziade: Whoa, I don’t wanna talk about football and New York City.
Rich Ziade: I’m a Jets fan. I’m a closet Jets fan.
Paul Ford: Mm-hmm.
Rich Ziade: Um, but yeah, football’s weird in New York. But yeah, New York City is, I mean, the Rangers, the Knicks, and whatnot.
Paul Ford: Well we just have, we have everything.
Rich Ziade: Well, this was, but then you’re going back to this game. It was just on another level and, and you could feel the earth kind of rumbling because there’s something so basic and universal about soccer.
Rich Ziade: You can learn it when you’re like three weeks old. It’s the most basic rules you’ve ever seen.
Paul Ford: No, no. You see that, you see there are YouTube videos and three year olds are playing and they’re pretty good, right?
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: The rules, I mean, so I’m not a sports person. [00:04:00] I’m just not, never have been. Um, and I, although, you know, I like the Phils, I grew up, I grew up near Philadelphia.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: I like the Eagles, so I have, I have a little bit of connection. I remember coming here and I would meet people who came from UNC or had been to University of North Carolina or, or had graduated from Michigan, and it was their lives.
Rich Ziade: It’s religion. Yeah.
Paul Ford: They lived inside of the game. They lived inside of those teams and they, they thought about it and they talked about it. And my friend who, um, went to UNC, I asked him, because he grew up in North Carolina, I’m like, what was it like as a kid? He’s like, oh, they would stop school, roll in a television and we would watch championship.
Rich Ziade: That’s wild.
Paul Ford: Right. Like, just like, “Hey guys, science is canceled for today”.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: “Because of basketball”.
Rich Ziade: And, and, and I’m guessing there are parts of Brazil when that game was happening.
Rich Ziade: I mean, the whole city stopped. Everything stopped the whole country, I should say. Stopped to watch those games.
Paul Ford: Argentina froze. Right? That’s, what else are they gonna do?
Global Sport/FIFA and Corruption
Paul Ford: [00:05:00] FIFA is the, so
Rich Ziade: Oh,
Paul Ford: Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). It’s the, big one. It’s the one that runs soccer.
Rich Ziade: It’s like headquarters for the league, right? For the global League.
Paul Ford: Global organization.
Rich Ziade: There are leagues in many countries. By the way, there’s the Premier League in the UK. There’s Bundes Liga in Germany, but this is The league that sort of oversees the national teams. and I watched the documentary Paul recently.
Paul Ford: There is, there is a documentary on Netflix.
Rich Ziade: A few, there’s a few by the way.
Paul Ford: Oh yeah.
Rich Ziade: I’m watching it and then I found myself saying, okay, this is impossible cause this, this is an organization that is practically like a government, has immense power, immense influence. In fact, in many ways, transcends nationalities.
Rich Ziade: And, and like nation, national interests because it’s freaking soccer. Everybody gets it. Everybody wants it. Everybody needs it [00:06:00] and it’s kind of a rotten place. You also, you got this guy Blatter who if he had gone to the cocktail party instead of to the movies when he was 18. He would’ve been a dictator that killed millions of people. But it turns out.
Paul Ford: But, but instead, instead he just was friends with all those guys and helped them get soccer in their countries.
Rich Ziade: He was friends with all of them. And so I’m watching this thing and [00:07:00] I’m thinking to myself, okay, this is way bigger than this rinky-dink org can even handle, and the world… I did client services, I would pay for lunches to kind of get on the better side of people.
Paul Ford: Hold on. Okay so first of all…
Rich Ziade: What’s the big… Yeah,
Paul Ford: First of all, let, let’s, let’s frame this here, which is that a lot of people got arrested. There are a lot of money flying around internationally, uh, via FIFA. And the issue was, that, Um, other countries, countries, uh, compete to see who will get the World Cup every four years and Qatar got it. And Qatar is this like tiny little Arab country.
Rich Ziade: Very wealthy.
Paul Ford: That has an unbelievable amount of money. And according to different reports, Qatar’s like, oh, “We spent 8 billion dollars on this”. Other reports say they spent 280 billion dollars.
Rich Ziade: No one knows what’s real.
Paul Ford: No one knows what’s real. But what people do know is that money just sloshed out of Qatar and, and also like Adidas or spent all kinds of various, like.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, which this was one event.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: Which was a big one because it was like, where is the 22 World Cup?
Paul Ford: Well, what I know about FIFA is that there’s this sense of mounting corruption over the last like 30, 40 years. Just people going, oh God, it’s so corrupt. And then it just finally kind of burst.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: With this World Cup.
Rich Ziade: Well it’s also, it’s worth noting if you follow FIFA, they over, also oversee the regional cups as well. The Africa Cup, the, there’s one in North America and South America. I forget. Concacaf, I think it’s [00:08:00] called. And you have this voting system you have a bunch of votes that are given out to the Caribbean countries and territories and so, and it’s one vote per nation. So you’ve got England with a vote and then like Turks and Caicos with a vote.
Paul Ford: It’s like the US Senate.
Rich Ziade: It’s kind of like the US Senate.
Paul Ford: Where, where Montana gets two votes and so does California.
Paul Ford: That’s right and so it was rife for corruption. Right? And there’s a lot of like, a lot of like backroom dealing going on as to who gets what. And…
Paul Ford: Also different assumptions in different countries about how money flows.
Rich Ziade: Okay, but let me ask you something. Isn’t this, it’s, it’s a, it’s an extra national body. It doesn’t follow the laws of any one country.
I don’t know why they didn’t, weren’t more explicit and said, okay look, highest bidder gets the World Cup. Off we go and just money starts pouring in and, [00:09:00] and what’s the issue?
Paul Ford: It would be simpler. I agree with you on that. Just, okay guys, it’s all about money anyway, Qatar. Next year, Saudi Arabia, right next year.
Rich Ziade: Saudi Arabia wants it, by the way.
Paul Ford: Oh, and then the USA and you know, every, everybody who’s got money can have the World Cup makes sense, better airports, et cetera, et cetera. So there’s a kind of like super capitalist logic to it.
Rich Ziade: What is the big deal?
Paul Ford: Well, first of all, soccer is rules don’t, people are running around on the field. The only reason that it’s interesting to watch them run around on the field is that there’s rules and constraints.
Rich Ziade: So you can have a respectable victory.
Paul Ford: It’s impossible.
Rich Ziade: That’s trusted.
Paul Ford: Otherwise, they’re just running around with sticks.
Rich Ziade: Fine. I’m not doubting the refs on the field. You need rules, otherwise it’s just a bunch of people running around.
Paul Ford: No, cause I mean think about hockey, right? I’m gonna get thuggish men give them sticks and, and put them on ice. Without the rules. Everyone would literally die.
[00:10:00]
Paul Ford: Okay. Soccer’s a slightly more gentle game, but it’s meaningless without that structure.
Rich Ziade: Okay.
Paul Ford: Okay. So what is the purpose of FIFA? Well, it’s, it’s not-for-profit. First of all. It’s not a for-profit organization and its goal is to further sport. What does that mean?
It means to that sport has unifying. Elements to it that bring people together.
Rich Ziade: Ah,
Paul Ford: Sport is a thing that has great value in the world and this organization exists to preserve and put sport forward.
Rich Ziade: Okay so this is worth saying again. It’s a nonprofit.
Paul Ford: Correct.
Rich Ziade: It has a charter of what it’s going to do and how it’s going to govern itself.
Paul Ford: Mm-hmm.
Rich Ziade: And in the charter, it does not say, you can give me envelopes of cash in a Caribbean hotel.
Paul Ford: So you could say, wow, follow the rules on the field, but you know, of course it’s gonna get corrupt. There’s money moving around, it’s global. What are you gonna do? But if you don’t keep that standard up, corruption, and this is one thing you know from.
Paul Ford: Spending time and dealing with Lebanon.
Rich Ziade: Yeah,
Paul Ford: [00:11:00] A little drop of corruption in the water just spreads. It’s like putting, it’s like putting ink in the…
Rich Ziade: It’s contaminated.
Paul Ford: And here’s why. It’s because once it’s in there, then the ref can be bribed and he can look you in the eye and he can go, why? What? What’s the big deal? You took all the money.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. Right, right, right.
Paul Ford: And or the players can take steroids and,
Rich Ziade: It’s literally Lebanon.
Paul Ford: That’s right.
Rich Ziade: It’s kind of understood as status quo that that’s how things work.
Paul Ford: Bribery based cultures right?
Rich Ziade: So you have to have some ground rules that are open and, and signal to the world that we are going to play fairly,
Paul Ford: or you’ll lose the whole thing because people will turn their back on it if it gets bad enough.
Rich Ziade: So it’s widely speculated. Frankly, it’s not even much, I mean, there’s like pretty good anecdotal evidence that Qatar just literally pointed the money hose,
Paul Ford: Oh,
Rich Ziade: At FIFA and just unloaded bribe. Like they essentially bribed them to get the World Cup because,
Paul Ford: There are, [00:12:00] there are villas, they just, they just paid not even in, in dollars or pounds or euros.
Rich Ziade: Right.
Paul Ford: They paid in villas, like,
Rich Ziade: In boats.
Paul Ford: Exactly. Just obscene amounts of money. And to Qatar they’re like, look “we gotta up the brand here”.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: Right. We’re, we’re this little country. Al Jazeera isn’t quite killing it the way we were hoping, so we should do something else. What about the world’s most popular sporting event? And the beginning of it, everybody was like, this is a country with some problems bad, the way it treats immigrant labor, LGBTQ rights.
Rich Ziade: Lot of, lot of issues came up.
Paul Ford: Yeah, but by the end of the World Cup, everybody’s like, I hope Messi gets his day.
Rich Ziade: Ultimately everyone went back to the game.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: And it was, it was, I mean, they lucked out because it was a spectacular World Cup, like so many exciting dramatic moments. So at the end of the day, everyone wanted to watch good football.
Paul Ford: Qatar knew this. They’re like, we’re gonna, there’s no way for us to get this without just shooting money everywhere. We’re gonna [00:13:00] get it. We’ll build the stadiums. We know how to do that. And then everyone will have their stuff to say, and we’ll, you know, have the weirdest opening ceremony that anyone has ever seen in the history of the World Cup.
Paul Ford: Don’t even talk about it. If people want to see it, just go find YouTube.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: But uh, yeah, no, it, they rep the brand and they did good. And now everybody’s going like, ah, you know, they did a good job with the World Cup. Now they want the Olympics.
Rich Ziade: Oh, do they?
Paul Ford: Oh yeah.
Rich Ziade: Well they got all those stadiums now.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: Sure, Knock yourselves out.
Paul Ford: And you know, one of the stadiums is getting disassembled because it’s made out of containers and going to Ecuador.
Rich Ziade: A lot of the stadiums don’t, they don’t have the need for that kind of capacity I watched a whole thing about it.
Paul Ford: You can fit the whole country in the big one.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. And so what they’re doing is they’re taking like the top layer of the cake and like sending them to like poorer countries so they can, which I don’t know what poor country’s can do with like sections of a stadium, but that’s not the point.
Paul Ford: We’ll, we’ll, we’ll figure that out, we’ll figure that out.
Rich Ziade: Thanks guys.
Delete FIFA/Sports as a Platform
Rich Ziade: [00:14:00] So let me ask you this. Why, like, why don’t we delete FIFA and get going again?? Not to say the Olympic committee is better, but I mean it’s, I think it’s much more connected to governments. So there’s oversight, there’s stricter oversight. People like boot you out, like they’ll boot you out of there. Like they booted Russia out cause they were, they found them. You know, why can’t we just reset the thing?
Paul Ford: This is the nature of power, of giant platforms. You’ve got clusters of people, and if you say, I wanna reset it, there are people who will say, I don’t want you to reset it.
Rich Ziade: They’ve claimed the platform.
Paul Ford: You can’t. You cannot. Just reboot things in the world as it is. You can say you should.
Paul Ford: I obviously look, FIFA should be rebooted. They should start again,
Rich Ziade: Right.
Paul Ford: And they should hire someone who has tremendous moral standing, who is independently wealthy to start from scratch. It’s a disaster. It’s a disaster.
Rich Ziade: But.
Paul Ford: But what are you gonna do otherwise? [00:15:00] So, so you gotta do that, and then you gotta do it in the next four years. And you have to do it in such a way that it doesn’t lead to like a worldwide revolution as you take away people’s soccer.
Rich Ziade: Right. Right.
Paul Ford: So what the hell are you gonna do? You’re gonna say you’re gonna, you’re gonna,
Rich Ziade: The world has claimed it.
Paul Ford: So what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna go, well, we have instituted the reforms that are necessary,
Rich Ziade: Yes.
Paul Ford: And then we’ll find out if that’s a lie or not.
Rich Ziade: Right. I mean the world is committed to it. It is. I mean, you just used the word platform.
Paul Ford: Well this is a thing and I I, I, you know, when, it’s Ziade & Ford advisors, right? Why are we talking about sports? So I’m glad to get to there. There is a,
Rich Ziade: I like sports.
Paul Ford: I know. Me too, a little bit. A little more than I used to. I really enjoyed this World Cup, which I didn’t expect. So partially cause I’m over here working with you and you’re like, Hey, guess what,
Rich Ziade: Brazil, Ecuador or whatever…
Paul Ford: We definitely watched more soccer than we used to when we were running an agency. So there is a game designer named Frank Lance. Who, uh, [00:16:00] is sort of a theorist of games but has also created his own games. And somebody interviewed him once and this really stuck with me and they asked him kind of, you know, what, what kind of games do you really admire and what do you–and they were thinking video games cause he’s a video game guy.
Rich Ziade: Okay.
Paul Ford: And he went basketball. Cause people live their whole lives in it, man. Like people exist inside of basketball. They wake up in the morning and they think about basketball. They have careers in basketball. There’s a guy who sells beer at the stadium because of basketball.
Rich Ziade: Okay.
Paul Ford: So basketball is a set of rules and it’s a system and it brings people together.
Rich Ziade: It’s a culture.
Paul Ford: It’s a culture. It’s a, it’s a key part of culture and it’s a culture unto itself.
Rich Ziade: It’s a part of fashion. It’s a part of music. It’s a part of a lot of things, right? It’s, it’s not just “Game tomorrow night, 7:00 PM” it’s much more than that.
Paul Ford: That’s right. And so the, you know, the critical thing about basketball is it brings people together in a way that they find meaningful with rules and success and failure and aspiration.
Paul Ford: You may never be a good basketball player, [00:17:00] but you can admire and respect people who play basketball and think about what makes them better than others. And that is, frankly, for a lot of people. A big part of their life.
Rich Ziade: Sure.
Paul Ford: Like it’s an important, it’s a reason to get up in the morning, is to see what your, what the, what the tar heels are gonna do this time.
Rich Ziade: There’s this great, um, short documentary that Earl Morris famous documentary filmmaker made about this funeral home that like, like fits beautiful. Coffins with like if you’re a Green Bay Packers fan,
Paul Ford: Mmm-hmm.
Rich Ziade: Like it’s just decked out and it’s just like, it could be one giant football. It’s kind of insane.
Paul Ford: People want to be buried in the livery of their teams. Okay? That, I mean, that’s a no, but that, what does that tell you about humans? And you, we can laugh about it, but what it tells you is that–this is an organizing principle for humans and I, I feel that when we talk about social media and when we talk about platforms and we talk about technologies, things like Google or [00:18:00] Microsoft, but especially your Facebook and right now Twitter,
Rich Ziade: well, these are social places where you have identity and you’re connecting with others, right? Like Yeah.
Paul Ford: And we lose track of the thing that matters most, which is that there are rules.
Rich Ziade: There are rules, but they can’t be, you can’t turn the screws too much though.
Paul Ford: No.
Rich Ziade: You can’t. You gotta let them have their culture and their space.
Paul Ford: But you can moderate and you can boot and you can send. But like, yeah, on Twitter, one of the big rules was that it had to be short, had to write 140 and then later 280 characters.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yup, yup, yup.
Paul Ford: You know, Facebook, so all, and I think like there’s this tremendous anxiety. I almost think we would do ourselves better, rather than freaking out about social media all the time as a culture. And it is tricky the way it interacts with politics. But then again, sport interacts with politics too. Like Bolsonaro supporters are on the Brazilian teams.
Rich Ziade: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Paul Ford: on and on.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: So putting that aside for one second, like think about Twitter in the same way you might think about basketball.[00:19:00]
Rich Ziade: Yes.
Paul Ford: It’s a platform. It’s a system and it’s a set of rules. And I think one of the reasons that everybody is really freaking out about Elon Musk is he changes the rules every day.
Paul Ford: So Twitter is a sport.
Rich Ziade: Truly
Paul Ford: Basketball is a platform.
Rich Ziade: I mean, it is.
Paul Ford: The Middle East has a remarkable number of challenges.
Rich Ziade: I’m Lebanese, as you know Paul,
Paul Ford: It hardly ever comes up.
Rich Ziade: There’s this really, really amazing short documentary called “Lebanon Wins the World Cup”.
Paul Ford: To be clear, I don’t think Lebanon has ever even, has it ever fielded a team?
Rich Ziade: No. It’s 1982, Brazil, Italy, world Cup and Lebanon is in the throes of just an absolutely brutal civil war. That’s kind of, it’s not even a civil war, it’s just factions and gangs. Like, it’s just utter chaos and, and just madness. And the game between Brazil and Italy, uh, kicks in. This is the documentary’s about, [00:20:00] and the whole country–Beirut, the city, the capital of Lebanon just fell absolutely silent. And this includes Israel was occupying Lebanon at the time too.
Rich Ziade: So everybody put their weapons down and by the way, there, it’s not like there was satellite TV, it was radios and maybe some TV, watching and observing this game. And for that brief moment, everyone sort of shed the team uniform of whatever faction or group they were affiliated with, watched this game and then the like minutes after the game ends the rumbling kicks in again.
Paul Ford: Sure. The bombs start.
Rich Ziade: The bombs start again. Right. And, and so sport is, you know, I’ve heard the theories, like, if we didn’t have sports, man, we’d all kill each other. I, I kind of think that’s right. I think that’s real. I think we need that outlet.
Rich Ziade: We need to belong [00:21:00] to something and and soccer is kind of the ultimate platform, right? Like it is, it is one of those things that you can walk in anywhere and talk about it and be like, yes, yes, I know, I know, I know.
Paul Ford: Look, the proof in that is that sport more than most other, many other kinds of public events spills into violence.
Rich Ziade: Soccer is known for having bad outbreaks of violence.
Paul Ford: That’s right. I mean, when people go see a movie, typically they don’t, there’s no riot.
Rich Ziade: No.
Paul Ford: It’s a lot of people together watching a movie, but they don’t punch each other in the face.
Rich Ziade: That’s right.
Paul Ford: But if you get a lot of people together at a soccer game, whew, boy, it can get real bad. Right? So I think there are these emotions are, are, are there, and they’re always close to the surface.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: One of the most, um, nerve wracking experiences I’ve ever had was going to a Ranger’s playoff game with you and your brother.
Rich Ziade: It was intense.
Paul Ford: It just, you could feel a seething in the air and it didn’t feel good. It felt grim. Just grinding.
Rich Ziade: It is, there’s, it’s gladiatorial is the way I would put it.
Paul Ford: That’s right.
Rich Ziade: It was just intense and a lot at [00:22:00] stake, and it was just a lot of intense, like, it was almost like a violent energy.
Paul Ford: There is a great book. It’s by Bill Buford, it’s called “Among the Thugs”, and it’s a narrative. He, he embeds himself with soccer hooligans in the eighties.
Rich Ziade: Oh my God.
Paul Ford: And they’re not good people.
Rich Ziade: No.
Paul Ford: No.
Rich Ziade: It’s a rough scene.
Paul Ford: But he describes this moment where the mob is about to turn violent and just kind of the absolute electricity as a human just feeling this thing turn and that he was in it and everybody’s got their sticks and they’re gonna lose their minds.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: And so, so okay. Well, um, ways to think about sports.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: Go watch. Where can I see Lebanon wins the World Cup?
Rich Ziade: I don’t think you, I, you could search for it on the internet. I don’t know if it’s like available to stream. It might be. I think Vimeo had it on there for a bit, but they might’ve taken it down,
Paul Ford: You know, there are other ways to get digital assets you can find online, but we can’t really talk.
Rich Ziade: We’re not gonna mention those.
Paul Ford: Yeah, we won’t talk about that.
Outro
Rich Ziade: Yeah. Um, we are building a platform Paul.
Paul Ford: We are!
Rich Ziade: It’s called Aboard, and we have [00:23:00] another podcast called “The Aboard Podcast”, which we’re, we’re taking you on the journey of a startup and us figuring stuff out as we go out into the world.
Rich Ziade: Uh, you’ll find it on all, in all the usual places, but we’re really happy you’re listening to Ziade & Ford Advisors. And hit us up. How do they hit us up, Paul?
Paul Ford: hello@ZiadeFord.com is good. We still have @ZiadeFord on Twitter for as long as it remains, and they don’t block us,
Rich Ziade: Yes.
Paul Ford: No mastodon yet. But you know, just get in touch. We’re ready to give advice. So, you know, shoot us an email.
Rich Ziade: Have a wonderful day. Congratulations to Argentina.
Paul Ford: Congratulations. Nice to see Messi get his big win.
Rich Ziade: One more call out. Congratulations to Morocco. Amazing run. First African team to make it to the semi-finals.
Paul Ford: All right, let’s get outta here.
Rich Ziade: Have a great day. Bye.
Paul Ford: Bye.